The Next Queen of Heaven was published by William Morrow in 2010, and it is Maguire’s most explicitly theological novel — a book about faith, community, and the sacred in contemporary America, set not in a fairy-tale world but in the ordinary landscape of small-town New York.
The novel takes place in Thebes, a declining town in upstate New York, in the weeks before the millennium (December 1999). Three women’s stories intersect: Sister Alice Coyne, an elderly nun struggling with doubt; Tabitha Scales, a country singer trying to launch a career while raising a child alone; and Leontina Scales, Tabitha’s mother, who is dealing with her husband’s death and her own approaching mortality. Around them, the town prepares for Y2K with varying degrees of panic, resignation, and dark comedy.
The “next queen of heaven” is simultaneously the Virgin Mary (whose feast of the Assumption is approaching), the next great female country singer (Tabitha’s ambition), and whatever power or presence might be waiting to be born at the turn of the millennium. Maguire treats all three meanings with equal seriousness: the religious, the secular, and the mythic are not separate categories in his fiction but aspects of the same human need for meaning and transcendence.
Collecting The Next Queen of Heaven
First edition (William Morrow, New York, 2010): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $8–$20
- Without jacket: $3–$8